Policy

I was recently invited to come to the European Commission conference on Clean Air, about the role of AI. Most people would expect the usual story: AI will make things faster , models better , and cheaper. All of that is true, but that’s not the point. The most important aspect of AI here, and in many other domains, is to make stuff invisible. Stuff that just works, reliably, so we can build on it, depend on it, and focus on outcomes, not tools. To reduce the cognitive load, not increase it. ...

There is a growing and urgent need for a new kind of scientist – one who is skilled in applying not just knowledge but above all scientific skills to solve real-world problems, outside of academia or research. The fact is that many of our global drivers are complex, interrelated, dynamic, and strongly underpinned by science processes. Let’s see some examples: The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the compounding effect of interrelated progress in many fields from AI to Big Data, IoT, or cloud. Climate change and its impact (and opportunity) to drive positive change, like mitigation via more efficient factories or adaptation measures like green city spots that lower the temperature and improve our health. Sustainability and the need to play the interrelation of people and planet. These are just some quick examples. ...

Today is my last day as a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at The National Academies. The Program, and the extension I got, is now complete after 101 days. I knew about it like one year ago, and I decided to apply for it. Back then, I could not find much info or public feedback from former fellows. There is a great official webpage with lots of info, but I wanted real feedback from people. Here is mine, for the next to come, and everyone else. ...

-Background and authorship info- Part of the Mirzayan fellowship was to propose topics on which to write a policy paper. This is the topic I submitted and 10 other fellows joined. This is the result of 2 weeks of work. Some of the authors requested their authorship to remain internal to NAS. Therefore, I am not including names besides mine. Also you will note many similarities with my individual brief, in which I concentrated into the subtopic of Crowdsourcing development. ...

With the burgeoning use of Internet and mobile phone technology, user-generated content (UGC) has emerged as an innovative means of sharing data. In the last decade, subscriptions to mobile phones rose from 18% to 97% in the developed world, and from 1% to 45% in the developing world. Internet subscriptions increased 10-fold in the last 10 years, reaching now 20% of the world population. Facebook—launched in 2004— now has over 500 million users (half of users, ~5% of the world’s population, access Facebook every day). Twitter has grown to 100 million users worldwide since beginning in 2006. In 2010, Twitter hit 50 million tweets per day—an average of 600 tweets per second. UGC has shown promising advances in a broad variety of fields (e.g., epidemiological surveillance, crisis response, and e-governance, among many others). ...